Ping - APAC Region

Tue Mar 29 18:17:16 UTC 2011

On Tue, Mar 29, 2011 at 06:33:07PM +0100, Robert Lusby wrote:
> Looking at hosting some servers in Hong Kong, to serve the APAC region. Our
> client is worried that this may slow things down in their Australia region,
> and are wondering whether hosting the servers in an Australian data-centre
> would be a better option.
> 
> Does anyone have any statistics on this?

No formal statistics, just a lot of experience.  You may be unsurprised to
learn that serving into Australia from outside Australia is slower than
serving from within Australia.  That being said, there's a fair bit less
distance for the light to travel from Hong Kong or anywhere in the region
than from the US.  That is predicated on having good direct links, which is
eye-wateringly expensive if you're used to US data costs (data going from
China to Australia via San Jose...  aaargh).  Then again, hosting within
Australia is similarly expensive, so splitting your presence isn't going to
help you any from a cost PoV.

Anyone living in this part of the world is used to everything taking a
painful amount of time to load anyway, so unless you're doing something
really latency-critical (online gaming and VoIP are the only things that
leap to mind), hosting in a good west coast DC close to the trans-pacific
links will cost you an order of magnitude less and won't have any noticeable
impact on your visitor satisfaction scores.

> Or ... does anyone know of a "ping" tool we can use, hosted in Australia?

No shortage of APAC looking glasses / tools listed at traceroute.org.

- Matt

-- 
<FreeFrag> The most secure computer in the world is one not connected to the
	internet.  Thats why I recommend Telstra ADSL.
		-- bash.org/?168859